Caroline Shaw and Vanessa Goodman find new ways to fuse sound and movement in Graveyards and Gardens
A Music on Main introduction has led to a work that builds a world of audio stations, plants, and a lot of orange cord
Vanessa Goodman in Gardens and Graveyards. Photo by David Cooper
Music on Main livestreams Graveyards and Gardens January 28 and 29 as part of the PuSh International Peforming Arts Festival series
What happens when one of Vancouver’s most exciting contemporary-dance artists joins forces with one of America’s most innovative composers?
In quantifiable terms, 400 feet of orange sound cable, vintage record and cassette players, thrift-store lamps, and lush green houseplants. All of them create the rich physical world for their hypnotically looping new dance-installation called Graveyards and Gardens.
In less tangible terms, the lines between dance and music start to dissolve. That has music artist Caroline Shaw describing Vanessa Goodman as a sort of “co-composer” on the project. It’s no small compliment, coming as it does from the youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Shaw earned that honour in 2013 for the exhilaratingly textured a capella chorale Partita for 8 Voices—a work she created for vocal innovators Roomful of Teeth.
“I haven’t had the chance to collaborate this closely with a dancer before. It’s almost imagining the music as choreography,” Shaw says over a joint call with Goodman. Thanks to the pandemic, they are separated--the composer splitting time between Amherst, Massachusetts, and New York City, the dance artist in Vancouver. She continues, “It’s the way Vanessa talks about music and sound and the way they go together: I call her my composition teacher.”
“I learned so much from Caroline,” jumps in Goodman, “about music as sound inside a body. It’s so inspiring for me to live inside this world.”
Vanessa Goodman and Caroline Shaw. Photo by Dayna Szyndrowski
Clearly, the two were meant to work together. But to find out how they met, you have to back up a bit.
Shaw was composer-in-residence at Music on Main when artistic director David Pay suggested she perform a short improvisation with Goodman at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre as part of a Modulus Festival and Dances for a Small Stage program in 2016. Goodman was by then making a name for her striking danceworks, which include the multimedia Marshall McLuhan-Glenn Gould ode Wells Hill.
“We didn’t know each other at all,” recalls Shaw. “It was just a couple hours in the studio to say hello and to build an improvisation together which now lives on Youtube for eternity.”
And for good reason: anyone who’s seen the video of the small, stripped-down performance picked up on the artistic spark. Shot in black and white, Shaw layered her haunting vocal strains through a loop machine, Goodman channelling them directly through her lithe, fluid limbs.
For her part, Shaw has always been drawn to dance; she credits work as an accompanist to classes to making her “fall in love with music again”, and leading her into the composition she does today.
Graveyards and Gardens was an attempt by the pair to finally take their ideas further, into a full-length piece. Goodman says their shared interest in repetition and recollection led to experimentation and sampling in the studio.
“I’m always interested in memory and music in my work, and there are always references to older music,” explains Shaw. The trained violinist composes for string quartets, orchestras, and solo instruments as well as vocal works.
“One of the things we were both really interested in was decomposition and regeneration of material, and the idea of memory or musical memory. It’s the sense when you go to repeat something that your brain is just remembering the last time you remembered it. So within all these things are distortions or an evolution of what it is. And then it breaks down and something new emerges.”
That cycle plays out in multiple metaphorical ways in Graveyards and Gardens. In addition to the looping of Shaw’s score, a circle of safety-orange cord demarcates Goodman’s dance space. Meanwhile Goodman operates little “audio stations” on-stage where vinyl records and tape-deck cassettes rotate. The plants symbolize a more organic idea of the cycle; they decompose and return to the soil, just as our bodies will. The effect is somewhere between cozy vintage rec room and surreal electro-universe, made all the more mesmerizing by Shaw’s unearthly vocalizations. Due to pandemic restrictions, she won’t be able to perform them live with her looping Helicon voice processor.
Photo by Dayna Szyndrowski
“I love it because you hear Caroline's voice magically singing to us from cassette player, or sometimes circulating in the whole room,” says Goodman, who also performs spoken text in the work. “It feels like the spirit of Caroline is living through all these elements in the space. I find that equally inspiring: the space having its own living, breathing performance.”
Shaw’s sonic experiments here include digging into an online archive of Edison wax recordings, layering an early fuzzy sample of a choir singing Handel with an old cassette tape of ocean sounds. “I love this idea of putting this mechanical object in a tape deck and trying to experience something far away,” the composer says.
The show will be livestreamed each night to retain the improvisational elements both artists love to bring to their work. Their hope is to be able to tour it by late spring—and for this meaningful, cross-border partnership to live on.
“I hope for this to be a big part of my life for the next several years,” Shaw stresses. For these two, at least, the cycle is just beginning.
See more information and tickets here.
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